hiddenjumprope:nethenclawpuff:prettyarbitrary:22drunkb:fuckyeahspacehusbands:aldora89:tacosmells:#th

hiddenjumprope:nethenclawpuff:prettyarbitrary:22drunkb:fuckyeahspacehusbands:aldora89:tacosmells:#that’s not friendship spock that’s a bonerOkay, so there are a couple different levels to this (yes I am seriously turning a joke tag into meta).You couldn’t say “boner” on 1960s television.  Duh.  If you want Spock to admit some kind of intense feeling for Jim, it must appear platonic.“Friend” was used as code or cover for homoerotic subtext in entertainment during intolerant time periods.  While perhaps not the writer’s intention, that context exists.“Friendship” isn’t really a feeling anyway.  Which adds to the sense that Spock is confused and struggles to identify and label emotional urges.He is “ashamed” of the feeling.  Not just feelings in general, but this specific one.  Yet in later episodes, he seems to have no problem labeling Kirk as a friend.  So again, it stands to reason there’s not just “friendship” at play here.Years later, Roddenberry would invent a word for Kirk and Spock’s relationship that translates to some mysterious combination of “friend/brother/lover.”  i.e. he allowed for ambiguity.Therefore, in hindsight it’s conceivable that Spock was referring to a t’hy’la-like feeling in this scene - a nebulous jumble of intense platonic bonds and potential romanticism.Conclusion: a compromised Spock is confessing that he feels drawn to Jim.  But the ship is in danger, Spock dislikes/suppresses the emotion, and Jim probably doesn’t realize what he’s saying anyway.…so they’ll be doomed to spend the next seven years dancing around each other until Spock figures out how to accept his feels.Q.E.D.(✿◡‿◡)…also this is the climactic scene of the episode, and THE most charged moment of that scene.  And Spock can’t stop trying to explain himself, even in the midst of the important technobabble:”Understand, Jim. I’ve spent a whole lifetime learning to hide my feelings.”A line that summarizes the major conflict between them for years to come.But if imminent danger wasn’t there to interrupt them - an emotional Spock bent on pouring his heart out to a lonely Jim - who knows what this confession would have turned into?when I watched this episode, I was 100% incapable of interpreting this platonically. It’s a shame that given the emergency and the fact that this whole thing was motivated by an emotion/loss-of-inhibitions virus, the scene involved Kirk slapping Spock twice and yelling things like “PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER”Y’all who’ve only seen the movies have no idea.  NO IDEA.Look, I am not trying to shame you or lord some sort of fannish hierarchy over you.  I am just saying there’s a scene in the show where Kirk thinks Spock is giving him a back rub.  And he’s all ‘Awww, yiss’ till he realizes it’s one of the pretty lady crewmembers, and then shoos her off.  I’M NOT EVEN READING INTO IT.There’s an episode when Kirk gets stuck in a woman’s body, and Spock actually holds his hand.  Not to make a point.  Just because Kirk reaches out for him.Or Requiem for Methuselah, where Kirk falls really, seriously, “I would change my life for you” in love with an android woman. McCoy rakes Spock over hot coals for not being able to understand:“You see, I feel sorrier for you than I do for him because you’ll never know the things that love can drive a man to. The ecstasies, the miseries, the broken rules, the desperate chances, the glorious failures, the glorious victories. All of these things you’ll never know simply because the word love isn’t written into your book.”And Spock silently takes it, waits till McCoy leaves, and then calmly violates every moral precept of his people by mind-melding with a drugged-out sleeping Kirk to help him forget.Does that sound intense?  The episode is so much more intense.I just.  You do not even know.  I do not even know.  Every time I rewatch the series, I come away going, “Holy crap that is SO MUCH MORE SLASH THAN I REMEMBERED.”YES, YES YES. There is also Kirk declaring to an Admiral that Spock’s soul is as much his responsibility as his own. That is literally what he says. Gene invented the word t’hy’la specifically to describe these two, not for anybody else or as some vague Vulcan word or cultural background. Specifically for these two. It means friend/brother/lover. He put in lover, deliberately, when inventing a word specifically for the two of them. When Spock is about the complete the ritual that rids himself of all emotions the last emotional thing he lets himself think of is of Kirk, of his t’hy’la. And when later he realises that path was the wrong one and he’s grasping on for emotion and letting himself feel fully and without shame for the first time in an age he reaches for Kirk. Figuratively and literally. Grasps onto his hand and for a touch telepath species who often kiss by pressing two fingers together? Big thing there.These two are epic, and epic in a way no other characters in Trek ever were again. Oh, DS9 is my fave Trek but these two are something special and fantastical and deep. I don’t know if I ship them romantically or as some kind of queerplatonic thing but either way they are t’hy’la.Just, T’HY’LA. That word. There isn’t really a direct English translation of it but when I think of potentially finding someone in the future I think of wanting a t’hy’la like these two have. Not so bothered if it’s romantic or queerplatonic just as I’m not bothered if Kirk and Spock are one or the other. But I want t’hy’la.These two.I really need to continue watching Star Trek. -- source link

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